Tag: Twffaha

Fora9, A New Online Job Service For Women

MMM 1 Comment

Fora9Fora9 (read ‘Foras’, which means ‘Opportunities’ in Arabic) is a new free online job service out of Kuwait, created for women in the Middle East and North Africa, to make it easier for them to find job opportunities.

The idea came to life when the developing company was looking to build a team and faced difficulties getting to qualified women for certain positions even though they know they were obviously out there.

The design is simplistic and presents job opportunities under four different types which are part time jobs, full time jobs, telework, and volunteer work; and under several categories from IT jobs, to sales and marketing, to teaching and accounting, and more. Featured open job positions are also highlighted on the front page of the site.

The service also attempts to make it as simple as possible for companies and organizations to post their job openings that are tailored for women on the site, and reach a more targeted and qualified audience.

fora9

Fora9 is a product of Wasm Media, a Kuwait based company founded by Abdulmohsen Alajmi. It currently is available in Arabic only.

This isn’t the first time an Arab startup tries to tackle the women employment and jobs area; we previously covered Sudanese startup Twffaha that focused on the same point, which seems to have abandoned the effort at some point along the way.

Interview With Twffaha Co-Founder & CEO Ashraf Mansoor

MMM 4 Comments

Ashraf MansoorBefore anything, I’d really like to thank Ashraf Mansoor, the co-founder and CEO of Twffaha, the job portal for Arab women, which was previously reviewed here, for taking some of his time to answer our questions about Twffaha, and give us more insight into the startup, how things have been going so far, as well as sharing some tips and advice for other entrepreneurs.

How would you describe Twffaha in your own words?

Twffaha is an endeavor to endorse and promote recruiting women in the Middle East. It is an online job portal that strives to provide women job seekers with state-of-the art tools, and tips that will help them unearth jobs in accordance with their skills and qualifications. A platform for employers to land their next greatest prospect, and a belief that women are an underrated asset that if recruited properly will guide to economic growth and sustainability in the Middle East.

How did you get the idea for Twffaha? And what made you feel passionate about this specific idea?

The idea for Twffaha came in late 2007. We came across different studies that showed the rate of recruiting women in the region is far beyond the international rates. At the time we were designing a job portal for a different purpose, and then we thought we need to find a niche in order to compete with the numerous job portals in the market, that’s when we decided to launch an exclusive women job portal, and came up with the name Twffaha.

What difficulties or challenges did you face making Twffaha a reality?

As an Arabic startup you are destined to face challenges. The atmosphere is not conductive for startups. One of the problems was finding the right people who believed in the idea and who can be a driving force. We also encountered major outages during our public beta that forced us to reconsider our infrastructure, and find new reliable partners. We believe problems are an integral part of a startup structure, so we embrace them.

Read More

Twffaha, Job Portal For Arab Women

MMM 22 Comments

Twffaha, a new service based in Sudan, and founded by Sudanese entrepreneur Ashraf Mansoor, has recently launched in private beta, promoting itself as the first job site devoted to recruiting women in the Middle East.

The aim of the service is to empower Arab women, and address the problem of women unemployment in the region, by providing them with an online job service geared towards their needs, and that contributes to their career advancement.

Twffaha joins a number of already established players in the region’s online job and recruiting market, although they’re one of the first who focus only on a subset of the market.

Upon launch the service will be available in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman , Kuwait, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Iraq and Yemen.
They aim to add more countries as the service grows and they get to scale their underlying infrastructure.

The user interface is in English only for the time being.

The service should be launching into public beta in June. But if you’re interested in trying it out now, just send an email to beta@twffaha.com with the following referral code: startuparabia included in the subject line. This offer is valid for the first 100 people who request invites.

# Twffaha